‘The guests would make out wishes and float them in origami boats.’
A group of Valley women who volunteer for the Hathaway Home for Children made a kind of history Sunday, holding the first charity benefit in the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant.
If you didn’t go looking for it, you would hardly be aware of the Tillman plant, tucked away discreetly in the northeast corner of Sepulveda Basin.
The city engineers who built the satellite plant to extract water from the waste line were wise in keeping its profile to a minimum. As a rule, people don’t want to be reminded of such things.
All that aside, a distinct form of pride motivates those who make careers out of these necessary details. And it has found a pleasing expression in both the design of the Tillman plant and the 6 1/2-acre Japanese Garden the city built beside it.
The key element in both is water. Naturally it comes from the reclamation process.
The administration building, presenting a lean, angular concrete exterior, hangs out over the edge of a lake that is fed by a long sheet of water dancing in the wind as it falls from a concrete aqueduct running above a gallery of windows the length of the main hallway.
The lake, lined by black beach pebbles, curls away in a richly crafted pattern, forming the central element of the Japanese Garden.
UCLA professor Koichi Kawana styled the garden after those of the 18th- and 19th-Century Japanese feudal lords.
Besides aesthetic interest, it was built to show off the uses of reclaimed water. After its opening in April, 1985, the garden has been available by reservation for tours and weddings.
Hoping to begin a Valley tradition, the Valley League for Hathaway made it the backdrop for an elegant garden tea with a Japanese accent.
The league, which consists of about 50 women, was formed about three years ago as a separate Valley support group for the Hathaway Home for Children. The home provides live-in treatment and special education for troubled, abused and neglected children at its Children’s Village in the San Gabriel Mountains above Lake View Terrace.
About 200 friends of the home attended the party Sunday, the women wearing bright sun dresses, the men dressed casually. Each was greeted at the door by two girls in kimonos walking on wooden sandals.
The club’s publicist, Mary Jane Cooper, led me along a trail past cherry trees and black pines shaped in bonsai style toward the Japanese tea house, called the shoin .
She commented that every stone and tree had a significance.
A brochure provided some examples:
“A group of upright stones in the middle of the dry garden symbolize Horaison or Horaijima known as the island of immortals and everlasting happiness,” it said.
“That lamp is very important,” Cooper said, pointing out a carved stone decoration. “I wish I could tell you why.”
Docent Evelyn Maggiore, standing in the shade of a willow, came to her assistance.
She said the lantern was made to catch falling snow in beautiful patterns.
She also explained the hewn granite steps leading into the lake.
“On an estate of this size, most likely the landowner would have a boat,” she said. “This would be a focal point for summer parties. The guests would make out wishes and float them in origami boats.”
Inside the tea house, Hiroko Hojo, a California Institute of the Arts student, danced in a blue kimono, her face whitened with makeup.
Following the Juita-Mai style, she made slow, delicate movements meant to express her recollections of a lost boyfriend.
In a small side room, Shizuyo Becker performed the Hingashi-Abe tea ceremony. With precise and graceful strokes she lined up six tiny cups, rinsed them with water heated in a ceramic pot on a candle, spooned tea powder into a small pot and poured a sip into each cup.
The purpose of the tea ceremony, she said afterward, is to make the guest feel comfortable and to meditate.
“You settle down yourself in doing it,” she said.
Becker, a neighbor of one of the league’s members, volunteered for the job because she loves the ceremony, still practiced by women in her native Japan.
“I want to still continue that spirit, even if, for women today, they don’t want to serve it in the office,” she said. “Why not? As long as you make it, put your whole self in it, why not also serve it? Men could do it too.”
Becker said she had prepared the spring tea but could have done a summer iced tea, because it was so hot.
“We could splash the walls with water,” she said. “Even if you are hot, if you can see the water splash, you feel cool.”
At the head of the trail curling away from the tea house, a middle-aged woman with a parasol paused beside a bamboo bridge crossing a stream.
The water, to be honest, carried the faintest fragrance of the sedimentation process in the tanks from which it came.
But, looking at it, the woman felt enriched.
“Isn’t this the most beautiful place?” she said, mostly to herself.
At the trail’s end, back in the administration building, a silent auction was in progress and a caterer served sushi, tempura, fried chicken and oysters on the half-shell.
All that was missing was snow.
